Dirty secret of U.S. foreign policy: Legacy of torture

Meanwhile, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s numbing report of the
CIA’s brutal torture practices against terrorist suspects since 9-11 has
provoked a drama of would-be soul searching just two weeks before
Christmas.

As the political talk shows fill with experts debating the logic of
imposed suffering, we have heard no great voice of outrage from bishops,
pastors, rabbis and other religious leaders.

Are they co-opted in sins of silence?

Voices representing the ACLU, United Nations, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and others have called for the appointment of a new special prosecutor
to pursue justice against the government for trampling human rights,
coupled with legislation to eradicate this horror. This is perhaps the
only way out of a nightmare of our own creation.

Foreign leaders are rightly appalled at the institutionalization of
torture in American policy and fear the blowback on their own legal
systems at a time of coalition-building against the Islamic State
menace.

The scandal is how the terrorist assaults of 9-11 shocked Americans
into swallowing egregious moral behavior that we associate with militant
Islam and which has instead been put to defense of our putative values.

The CIA has long background in tactics of this kind, according to
Hendrik Voss, national organizer of School of Americas Watch (SOAW), the
group that has seen many of its members imprisoned for raising
awareness about the institute on the Army base at Ft. Benning, Georgia
which trained Latin American soldiers for decades in torture tactics —
an underground strategy of the Cold War.

“I think the people responsible for the torture should be indicted,”
Voss told GroundTruth. “Our movement has been speaking out for at least
20 years and engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience. More than 300
activists have served collectively over 100 years in federal prisons,
while no one who was responsible for torture has seen a day in court. We
think people should be indicted for authorizing torture and violation
of international conventions.”

Voss points to CIA and U.S. Army manuals in the 1950s and 1960s that
were translated into seven Spanish-language guides, more than 1,000 of
which were distributed to military in El Salvador, Guatemala, Ecuador
and Peru, and at the School of the Americas (SOA) between 1987 and 1991.

In Latin America, torture was one tactic in a larger web of U.S.
strategies that sanctioned lethal ends of targeted opponents, or
traumatizing a given prisoner to make life a continuing wound.

In El Salvador, a Nov. 16, 1989 raid by Salvadoran troops on the
University of Central America in the capital, San Salvador and the
massacre of six Jesuit priests, the housekeeper Elba Ramos and her
16-year-old daughter Celina.

Under pressure from Congressmen Joseph Moakley and Joseph Kennedy of
Massachusetts — as well as a UN Truth Commission — the Pentagon released
training manuals which, with other documents, identified military officers involved in the atrocity who were trained at the SOA.
The chain of events leading to the release of the documents was not
unlike those preceding this week's release of the Senate's torture
report, as Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, pushed hard for disclosure.

Rep. Jim McGovern, who served on the Moakley Commission, wrote recently in Huffington Post,
“As part of our investigation, I was deeply upset to find that 19 of
the 26 members of the unit that killed the priests and women had
received US taxpayer-paid military training at the U.S. Army School of the
Americas.”

The massacres sparked Father Roy Bourgeois,
a Maryknoll missionary who had been arrested and deported for his work
in Bolivia, to join public protests that led to the SOAW founding. He
went to jail several times for his nonviolent protests.

This Nov. 16 marked the 25th anniversary of the massacres. No one has
been tried. Attorneys with the Center for Justice and Accountability in
San Francisco filed a case in 2008 at the Spanish National Court,
arguing for universal jurisdiction in a human rights atrocity. Presiding
Judge Eloy Velásquez has indicted 20 officials from El Salvador’s
military for alleged roles in the crime, despite the Spanish
Parliament’s reluctance to see the country’s judiciary take on such
cases.

But there has to be some universality of judicial values to counter the spreading use of torture.

What did the Reagan policy in El Salvador achieve? The country is a
democracy on paper. Drug gangs, fraught with youth deported from
America, have created a reign of terror while thousands of people,
particularly children, amass at our borders as they try to escape the
institutionalized violence of a broken economy.

The anti-communism at all costs strategy the Reagan administration
sold to Congress was an abysmal failure in El Salvador. The military was
enmeshed with CIA and U.S. military advisors. The 1981 massacre of 767
men, women and children at the village of El Mozote, exposed in 1982 by
Raymond Bonner of the New York Times and Alma Guillermoprieto of the
Washington Post, sparked a damage-control campaign by the administration
that ran for years.

The debate just now building over the Senate CIA report reflects an
evolution of torture tactics from generals and soldiers in Latin America
to intelligence agents and sleazy social scientists in the war on
terror.

The institutionalization of torture in U.S. policy is a direct
challenge to the American legal system. If the Army can do it, if the
CIA can do it, then local police stations will feel greater impunity in
their interrogations of suspects for murder and lesser crimes.

It is a coincidence, but not an accident, that African-American
protests have spread in recent days since the failure of grand juries in
Ferguson, Missouri, and New York City to indict police officers who
killed black suspects.

“Reprisals against civilian populations and the use of torture are
crimes in which we are all involved,” Albert Camus wrote in 1958,
responding to French reports on the country’s use of torture against
militants in Algeria.

“The moment [such methods] are justified, even directly, there are no
more rules and values; all causes are equally good, and war without
aims or laws sanctions the triumph of nihilism.”

Torture destroys moral values. That is where we are in America today,
debasing our standards to the level of maddened fighters who debase the
name of Islam with mass killings of the innocent and by torturing and
beheading their prisoners. American operatives have not beheaded anyone,
to our knowledge, so at least we’re slightly ahead in the march of
civilization.

This article originally appeared on GlobalPost.

Jason Berry achieved prominence for his reporting on the Catholic Church crisis in Lead Us Not Into Temptation (1992), a book used in many newsrooms. He has been widely interviewed in the national media, with many appearances on Nightline, Oprah, ABC and CNN. USA Today called Berry “the rare investigative reporter whose scholarship, compassion and ability to write with the poetic power of Robert Penn Warren are in perfect balance.”

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